Opinion columnist and blogger at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Just a touch of bravery, logic would help a lot vs. Ebola

Kaci Hickox, an American nurse who volunteered to fight Ebola with Doctors Without Borders, returned home to the United States over the weekend. Hickox was healthy, not to mention brave, but the country she returned to was neither. Fear, ignorance and political pandering had taken its toll.

Upon Hickox’ arrival and her volunteered statement that she was returning from Sierra Leone, she was stopped and detained at Newark International Airport for seven hours. She was then taken by police escort to a New Jersey hospital, where she was quarantined outside, in a tent, against her will and against the advice of public health experts. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie publicly pronounced Hickox as “obviously ill” and said she would not be allowed to leave quarantine for 21 days.

But Christie is not a physician, and Hickox was not and is not ill. She had been tested for Ebola and the tests came back negative. She has displayed no symptoms of Ebola. She cannot infect anyone with a disease that she does not have. She was forcibly quarantined due to a gross overreaction based not on science or medicine but on fear, and perhaps on political showboating.

And after insisting that he harbored no second thoughts about his decision and would not reconsider it, Christie today released Hickox and allowed her to leave for her home in Maine.

“It is not a sound public health decision and well thought out,” Hickox told CNN during the three days she was confined in that tent. “Many of the experts in the field have come out to agree with me. So I think that we need to stress the fact that we don’t need politicians to make these kinds of decisions. We need public health experts to make these decisions.”

That’s exactly right. If this is how we treat people who volunteer to go fight Ebola, fewer people will volunteer to fight Ebola. If fewer people volunteer to fight Ebola, the disease will spread more quickly and be more difficult to stop. A problem that is still manageable can become unmanageable. A fear-driven policy intended to try to protect against the disease will instead help it to spread.

Even before the botching of the Hickox case, international experts were warning that we’re facing a shortage of thousands of trained medical people in west Africa to confront the epidemic.** “It’s just an unintended consequence,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Health, pointed out. “If we don’t have our people volunteering to go over there, then you’re going to have other countries that are not going to do it, and then the epidemic will continue to roar.”

Logically, under the policy initially adopted by Christie, and also by officials in Florida, Illinois and New York, even those doctors and nurses who are treating Ebola patients here in the United States would have to be quarantined as well. Like Hickox, they too have been exposed to ill patients. It’s just dumb.

And I’m grateful that so far at least, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has not succumbed to the irrational and fearful. Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is one of five U.S. airports designated to accept and screen travelers from nations dealing with Ebola, and it would set a particularly bad example if Atlanta, the home of the Centers for Disease Control, the most-respected disease fighters in the world, adopted a policy so at odds with scientific reality. It would also greatly complicate the CDC’s work at a time when it is needed most.

Surely, we can be brave enough to tolerate the infinitesimal odds of contracting Ebola here at home while others travel directly to the front lines to fight it on our behalf.
—————-**(The country that has contributed more medical workers than any other nation is Cuba, and Cubans will help staff the clinics that US soldiers are building in west Africa.)

Reader Comments 0

"Brave enough to tolerate the infinitesimal odds of contracting Ebola"? Has nothing to do with bravery, but common sense and protection of the well-being of our citizens. Odds may be "infinitesimal" but we know of 3 who caught it, 2 caring for the same patient. It's rather arrogant for a person to insist they need not be quarantined for a period because they're not sick, even though they've been in contact with someone or several someones who ARE sick, with a deadly disease. Why does altruism have to have anything to do with it? Why doesn't her altruism extend to her fellow U.S. citizens?

To mr bookman and all the rest of you making this political, shame on you. You can pick on Christie, but the NY governor has the same restrictions regarding citizens exposed to Ebola, and he is a Democrat. You'd all be singing a different tune if Cuomo had demanded this. Shame on you.

"Governor Nathan Deal orders Monday that travelers entering Georgia who had direct contact with an Ebola patient will be “subject to quarantine at a designated facility,” even if they show no symptoms."

And now you hear the sound of the stadium when your team is about to make a touchdown and they fumble on the 2 yard line.

The problem with a mandatory quarantine, even if done at home, is that it can discourage heath care workers from volunteering to fight the virus at its source in West Africa. Doctors Without Borders, the nongovernmental organization that has led the battle there, typically sends its workers on arduous four- to six-week assignments. The risk of being quarantined for another 21 days upon return has already prompted some people to reduce their length of time in the field and may discourage others from volunteering in the first place.

An editorial published Monday in The New England Journal of Medicine cited estimates that tens of thousands of additional volunteers will be needed to control the epidemic and warned that a mandatory 21-day quarantine, for people who are not sick and may never become sick, would be “more destructive than beneficial.” Policies that will reduce the chances of recruiting additional volunteers — without actually protecting the public — will only make the Ebola crisis worse.

The NYTimes

Why worry about ebola at all? It is just a disease. Quarantines never work anyway. But, Cuomo and Christy have jumped on the bandwagon and neither of them are tea partiers or rwingers.

Political theater by Christie and Nathan Deal . I assume all the Emory medical staff who treated Nurse Vinson will be quarantined by Deal and given a porta potty , kept in a tent and given one granola bar a day.

Really remarkable that a guy running for re-election as Governor would actually nickle-and-dime over paying those folks' lost wages due to his quarantine policy. Folks brave and decent enough to go work among the most destitute and desperate among us.

I was thinking about cutting Deal a bit of slack since the policy itself isn't super-unreasonable, until I happened upon this:

The governor also ruled out compensating lost wages for those who are quarantined.

“I don’t think it’s right to ask the taxpayers of this state to pay for individuals who have perhaps put themselves in this category,” he said. “We are incurring the expense of all the monitoring and all the quarantining that may be associated with it. I certainly don’t think we need to compensate them for their lost time.”

The greatness of the country is its science and intelligence. No
country on earth responds to crisis like we do, yet like India and its
cows roaming the streets we have our distractions for a direct line of success.
You can see it in different degrees in
the states that lean right or left. The one leaning right or more second world
in reality while the ones lean left really are more the America that got us
here.

Communication in this new age of communication seems to be
handicapped when it comes to educating the public. Inaccurate facts seem to be allowed to hang
out there; I notice it, in frustration, in the general elections two years ago.
Do we redesign our message to predict these inaccuracies, lead by predictable
responses or stubbornly expect the public to eventually gather itself and
correct its misconceptions?

There are cheap votes in quarantine, but the flip side is
when one of these doctors or nurses, who bravely have treated the disease, gets
sick 40 more people’s freedoms are compromise by the one, as they have to be
quarantine, with far less likelihood of being diseased. Time
is the only cure of the perception of Ebola, but in that time I hope we keep
score of who was correct and who was encouraging unnecessary fear for personal
gain.

I think that Christie, and also Cuomo, simply misread the nature of
the public alarm. Despite the tone on cable news, and despite the wildly
over-publicized decisions of a few parents in a few school districts to
keep their kids home, there hasn't been a public panic over Ebola.
People are still traveling on airplanes. They are not flooding the
hospitals with anxieties that minor symptoms might portend Ebola.
Everyone whose job it is to predict public opinion seems to have been
bracing for a panic. But it hasn't come. A dumb and snotty cottage
industry has developed in making fun of those who are freaking out. (As I
write, the most-viewed story on The New Yorker's website is a "humor" column
by Andy Borowitz titled, "Study: Fear of Ebola Highest Among People Who
Did Not Pay Attention During Math and Science Classes.") But really
there hasn't been much excess fear at all.

By the time this became apparent Christie had already adopted his
customary pose — Davy Crockett at the barricades, seeing Comanches in
the international-arrivals lounge at Newark Airport. He wouldn't be
dissuaded by making "this woman uncomfortable" if she posed a threat.
But when Kaci Hickox wrote an outraged story about her confinement in the Dallas Morning News,
and when it became clear that public-health officials thought she posed
no threat at all, Christie was left fulminating against an enemy that
no one else saw. In this case, the public's sympathies were with the
outsider.

So, sure, a doctor
who treated patients in Guinea came home to the city. And, yes, he has
Ebola. And, yes, he rode the trains and went bowling, probably had sex
with his girlfriend, even. If you are someone who wants a travel ban on
people from West Africa, are you saying that we should have just left
him in Guinea, that we should leave Americans there?

Within 12 hours of this news, we got word
that Nina Pham, the nurse who got Ebola treating the first Ebola
patient in Dallas, is leaving the hospital, just fine. And by April, we
could start having mass vaccinations of populations who are at risk for Ebola. Medicine and science. Who would have thought.

The Rude Pundit had a conversation today with a friend who lives in the
South. She badly wants to leave, wants to move up here, to the
Northeast. "You know what it is?" she said. "I just can't stand the
Jesus crap anymore."

"I know," the Rude Pundit responded. "And it's like it's gotten worse in the last few years."

If there were a list of diseases in America that
either captured the death toll or the actual infected, Ebola would have to be
last on the list, any other disease with less than this number would have been
eradicated.

We elect our state leaders in a week.The sober thought here is do we want an ethically
challenged leader with obvious distraction towards personal gain controlling
our population with marshal law? Do we
have time in this generation to fight the problem and also question the motives
of the people in charge? Why make that
the question?

@Cupofjoe Cupofjoe, Thanks for your comments. I didn't read those blogs but if that's what floats your boat and helps you get through each day then continue on with it. I still strongly believe that reading skills are very important and based on your responses below plus this posting I can tell you need to brush up on those skills.

I could really care less about which school is at the top. I'm proud that GT is there but does GT represent the entire south? No, of course it doesn't and that is what I was pointing out if you actually read what I posted. You seem to believe that since GT is #1 that all Southern schools are better than any Northern school. I don't think that's what I read from the list but again if that is what floats your boat then go for it.

today I "learned" that Georgia is actually very smart because a teensy-tiny percentage of its residents attend a college located within the state that happened to top a rather arbitrary list based on SAT scores (which didn't, FWIW, include any other GA colleges in the top 30.)

@stands_for_decibels Well get your rich Democratic donors to stop putting billions in elections and start paying these healthcare workers when they come home and have to be put in isolation for 21 days. Why does it have to be the government to pay people?

@Cupofjoe I agree with your statement. On the whole there are more colleges NOT from the South on the list. Sure GT is number one and there are some other Southern schools there but on the whole I see other great institutions of higher learning on the list.

I support this woman and believe that she should indeed move to the Northeast. It would be great if all liberals living in the Southern United states were as brave as this woman and would also move to the Northeast.

In three weeks--an interesting time Peachs--if you were infected today--let's say I have it, and, by way of example, brush something out of my eye and then shake your hand. You do the same or you don't fully wash your hands before you grab a potato chip. You could be infected and begin showing symptoms, if you were infected today, in less than three weeks. If you didn't catch on to what you had, you could be lifeless before your favorite candidates were sworn in.

@td1234@stands_for_decibelsArticle the sixth... The right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable
cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Well while we are making up ways to die I think voting
Republican in the next state election is more hazardous to your health than any
casual touching as Jesus has suggested. If this were the low bar of infection half Dallas would be dead by
now.

@Yes_Jesus_Can@Peachs Oh YJC, you are still spouting off about all of the ways people can get ebola but you have NO, ZERO scientific or medical data to back you up. I believe the CDC and its measures are all that we need at this point. Conservative governors are the ones pushing for stricter measures which I think are uncalled for.

@td1234@Doggone_GA Where did I say it wasn't? But if you lock someone up in isolation because you think they MIGHT have it...and they don't...that is unreasonable search and seizure. And you know that perfectly well. You're not stupid.